Underappreciated Author Spotlight: Casca · 8:27pm Oct 7th, 2017
So today, Cold in Gardez put up the exhortation at the beginning of a blog post wherein he says that people who have much of an audience should take it upon themselves to help out those authors who have the talent to deserve more attention but don't get it. Truth be told, I've been sitting on the idea to do underappreciated author signal boosting for close to a year now, but with Gardez's prompting, I might as well get off my ass and do it. Hey, it'll probably be many months before I get around to doing another!
Thing is, I don't know how much this'll help. I'm blessed with a pretty good-sized following, but nothing monumental. My blog posts never get more than a couple hundred views, often below 100 anymore, so it's not like Casca's suddenly going to see an influx of new follows. But for what it's worth, I'm spotlighting him in the first of these blogs. Why Casca? Have a look after the break.
It baffles me that as of this moment, Casca has only 136 followers. The reasons are myriad. He's been around a long time: "Member Since 9th Dec, 2011." He helped out with ponychan's Training Grounds back when they saw lots and lots of traffic, so he interacted with lots of good reviewers and up-and-coming authors. He was a contributor to Seattle's Angels (I can't remember that long ago, but I think I recommended him to Seattle_Lite when he was first starting the group) for a long time, and he did a brief stint as an Equestria Daily pre-reader (though to be fair, not many people knew that at the time, and Casca himself didn't want to publicize the fact for reasons I completely understand). So he's long been associated with good writers and good writing advice. But hey, the best editors aren't star material (though they should be). People who do lots of publicly visible things (podcasts, art, fic readings) can get quite a following, and I'm a little surprised Casca never got much name recognition through Seattle's Angels, though I don't know if he was involved in the podcasts much. Still, for most of us, you get known around here for what you write.
Yet taking that into account, I'm still baffled. Let me look through what Casca has written. I'll pick out just a few to highlight.
"Pipsqueak the Valiant's Adventure Journal!"
This goes back to the beginning. Way back. Like to the very first write-off. Just a bit of history: The write-offs started as something the reviewing community on ponychan did as a friendly competition but more of a writing workshop. Still, it was stringent. Writing something to a prompt in just three days isn't that bad, but many of the authors could put out stories pushing 7-8k words in that time, and I didn't join until the third write-off (I didn't know about the first one, and I was too intimidated to enter the second, so I volunteered as a judge, when we actually used them). But again, it was more of a workshop, where the real prize is the feedback you'd get from good reviewers. Since then, the write-off wound through moving to this site, then to its own site, and I'd argue there's little value in the reviewing that goes on there anymore, and if that was supposed to be the main draw... well, that's a rant for another day. Or, actually, never.
Casca won the first write-off with this entry against a field of 18 others. The write-off got much bigger at one point, but it's shrunk back down about to this level now. As I look back through the other entries, it's definitely a who's who of reviewers and writers from the fandom's early days, but not many of these folks are around anymore. Still, theworstwriter, Flashgen, Ezn, Simon o'Sullivan: these are names I hope some people still remember, because they're worth remembering. And Flashgen's still active! Even so, it's an early work of Casca's, and any of you who've written over an extended period no doubt look back on your older stuff with a bit of a cringe. This one holds up, though. Gold medal winner in the first write-off, to Equestria Daily feature, to Royal Canterlot inductee over three years after it was written! (Casca didn't post it to this site until almost a year after he wrote it.)
Despite all that, the story's only got 905 views. This went up at the height of the fandom, when 500 views was given no matter what, and an Equestria Daily feature virtually guaranteed you 2000. Well, there's a hitch: Like I said, Casca didn't post it here until well after he wrote it, and the EqD feature likely pointed to a GDocs version at the time. Still, that audience tends to carry over when they get posted here (just look at "My Little Dashie"), and the FiMFic publication date of early 2013 was still a bull market for MLP fanfiction. Why so little attention for this one? The only tagged characters are "Pipsqueak," "The Mayor," and "Other." Not too surprising that might not garner a ton of interest, though maybe some of those "other" characters are tags knighty's since added and Casca just didn't know about. But this is a theme I'm going to continue seeing with Casca's work: good stories passed up because of tags that tend not to interest readers who'd rather just read about Rainbow Dash.
"The Life and Times of an Honest Pony"
Hey, another write-off winner! Against 16 others, and a few more recognizable names. Hey, and one of my own entries! Didn't finish too well, and in those days, the non-finalists didn't get ranked, just lumped together, but with help from a couple folks I acknowledged in the description, my entry eventually became "The Wrong Side of Tomorrow."
Anyway, this is another great story that got an Equestria Daily feature, and at 1649, it has the second-most views of any of his stories and was published at a high point in the fandom. It's one of only five of his to clear 1k views, though one or two more are close, out of thirteen total. And this one is very much in Casca's wheelhouse. It's a quiet story, tragic in this case, that doesn't revolve around some overblown drama. It lets the characters shine. It deserved its write-off win; I, for one, put it at the top of my ballot. We get a character who's immediately sympathetic, and his personality leaps off the page. It's a fairly simple idea for a story, and I don't want to get into it too much, lest I spoil things, but suffice it to say that those of you who don't need some trumped-up romance or bombast to enjoy a story, this one is rewarding.
Now I'm going to do something you don't see in this kind of paean blogpost often. I didn't like this story, and I'll tell you why. It's easily Casca's most read, at 3764 views, and given the "Main 6" character tag and cover art of Rainbow Dash from her "Newbie Dash" appearance of wearing Rarity's hairdo, that's no surprise. I won't linger on why I didn't like it, since that's not the focus of this blog, but just the character tag and cover art frame a good contrast of why a story like this does well when others much more deserve to.
This story just riffs on Rainbow's impressions of her friends from that episode, but now she's performing them for her friends. They all very much enjoy watching, except for when they're the subject, but aside from Rarity making an easy-to-miss comment about liking Dash for her true self, this one never drew any kind of conclusion or developed any of the characters. Perspective wavered between omniscient and limited, and while limited, it skipped around to different characters a lot. Misses happen for all of us, and sometimes, it's our biggest stories that do so (I'm definitely in this group).
This has only 509 views, which isn't too surprising, given the all-OC cast. It was featured by Equestria Daily and The Royal Guard. It got a high recommendation from Paul Asaran. It was nominated for a popularity contest opportunity to have authors already inducted into the Royal Canterlot Library get a second feature based on readers feeling like the original featured story wasn't indicative of the author's true style. At least on those grounds, I think this story might have been a better RCL choice, and it may well be that this is also true of the more popular authors' nominated stories, but the point is Casca never stood a chance on follower count alone. Not enough people would have read his stories to know what his style is or that "Scald" was a better example of it. But I've already tilted at that windmill.
As I've said, Casca excels at the quiet character piece, and this one just oozes atmosphere. By the time Casca submitted this to Equestria Daily, it only had two of the three chapters done. I made the point that good writing can cover up lots of mistakes; if a reader is lost in the beauty of the prose, he may well forgive or not even notice a small logical inconsistency in the plot, for example. And my only complaint here was that I didn't feel I had a good picture of who Lilac was. She's an accountant, one played a bit against stereotype, and she likes coffee. That was it. But the writing was so good and the atmosphere so engrossing that I didn't mind. And maybe Casca went on to address that after I read it. I don't know. I'd recommend the story anyway.
Not just for its atmosphere, but it also takes a bit of an unexpected direction. Spoilers again—I won't say what, and it's not like it's something shocking. It's just that most stories you see like this go for a very pat ending, and this one didn't. That left it feeling more realistic and relatable. But that atmosphere!
It's easy to start a story with very evocative descriptions and flowing sentences, only to lose steam after a while. I've been there. This one keeps it up. From the rich setting to the protagonist's lyrical musings to really identifying with Lilac and seeing things through her eyes, this was a treat to read. Details matter. Too many authors are happy dwelling in vagueness, just saying the character is in a room and giving the most bare-bones description of it possible. But it's the little things that bring a scene to life. Some go overboard—we don't need to know every little thing in there as if we had a photograph we could linger on as long as we liked. There's a balance to be found. Enough detail to bring the scene to life, but not so much that the reader drowns in irrelevance. And irrelevance is the key here. Those details should perform double duty. Once the character of the setting is established, more is unnecessary. Mahogany tables, sure. A mahogany bookshelf, okay. Mahogany chairs... well, now it's not adding much anymore.
This story strikes a good balance. Back to feeling like I didn't know Lilac that well, details are another avenue for exploring that. Given that the story uses Lilac as a limited narrator, they can be very telling. What kinds of details catch her eye, which ones she dwells on for a moment, which ones she scoffs at—they say a lot about who she is. We do get a beautiful picture of her surroundings from these details, though, and even where we don't necessarily get Lilac's take, the descriptions do still stop on the kinds of things that would stand out to most people, so while not that illustrative of her specifically, they enliven the scene far more than a perfunctory one-sentence blurb would. I don't believe Casca did so in this story, but these little items can also make effective use of symbolism.
I do agree with whoever nominated this story for an RCL re-feature. It's decidedly a Casca story, quiet, introspective, atmospheric, so real, and ultimately overlooked.
Holy crap, how does Casca have so few followers?
i.imgur.com/ecqXHSj.png
I've only read Honest Pony and Clyde Pie — possibly some write-off entries, too — both of which were good. Pipsqueak's been on my list for ages. I should bump that one up
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Maybe they're worried about the Brand. Following Casca around tends to expose a person to far more demons than usual.
A worthy recommendation. Moreover, one that caused me to notice that I'm not actually following him!
Better fix that...
Any blog recommending Casca is a good blog.
I've always thought Casca is the most criminally underrated author on the site.
That was me. If I were to spotlight an under-appreciated author (and perhaps I should), Casca would top the list.
You made me get Scald off my RIL. Thank you.
wow hey this is a surprise
Damn, I really don't know what to say except thanks. I've been dead silent on Fimfic for RL reasons - the same ones behind my usual absence for most of the year - so the sudden notifications of people watching me was what led me to here.
I mean... thank you, really. It's kinda crazy and really flattering to just read your thoughts on some of my stuff - a lot more of my stuff than expected - considering that between us having shared a reviewers' circle for a while, Scald is the only work of mine with you as an editor, and even then it was more of a proactive move by you as it passed through the EqD ficbox.
I will say that Scald couldn't have been half as wonderful as people say it is without your help! Those tweaks were really needed in getting the atmosphere right. I hope that whoever gives those stories a read will enjoy it, and I appreciate the signal boost.
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All I can say is that I wouldn't have done it if you didn't deserve it.
Scald was really, really good.